Increasingly, computing devices (e.g., PDA's, cell phones, laptops, wireless handheld devices, and the like) that implement touchscreen interfaces have become popular in commercial markets. These touchscreen interfaces are an important differentiating feature for computing devices and other electronics as they tend to offer intuitive interaction with software integrated therein. Optimally, touchscreen interfaces should provide a complete software experience that can manipulate the software to achieve all the functionality available to conventional input device. However, a significant amount of provided software has not been designed with touch in mind, referred to hereinafter as touch-naïve applications. For instance, in the case of touch-naïve applications that are configured for scrolling through content rendered in a display area at a user-interface (UI) display, the scrolling functionality is not entirely integrated with a touchscreen interface. That is, the ability to scroll through content by applying a drag operation on a content region within the display area is not available to a touchscreen interface. Instead, typically, mouse users scroll content via conventional mouse inputs applied to the scrollbar, and keyboard users either use page up or page down, a keyboard shortcut like ctrl-end, or switch to using the mouse. These keyboard methods do not corporate with a touch interface, and applying touch to a touch interface in the same manner as mouse users (i.e., trying to drive the scrollbar accurately with a pointing device) is difficult due to the precision and targeting issues users generally have with applying the touch.
So far, no solution for making accessible complete functionality of touch-naïve applications to users of touchscreen interfaces has been developed. Even further, no scheme exists that adapts gestures applied to a touchscreen interface, which may be different in movement than expected movements from conventional input devices, to commands that manipulate the display of content in a display area in an optimized intuitive manner. As such, employing gesture-interpretation techniques for controlling scrolling functionality of touch-naïve applications would enhance a user's experience in panning content upon applying particular gestures (e.g., a drag operation at the content region of a display area) to the touchscreen interface. Generally, if an area includes a feature that allows vertical scrolling, panning messages are generated in accordance with the touches detected at the touch interface. Otherwise, touch input at the touch interface generates mouse messages.